15 December 2011

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Harvard professor Steven Pinker argues that, despite the violence saturating our media, we are actually living in a time of unprecedented peace for humanity. We have inner motives towards violence, he explains, but also towards peacefulness, and society has been arranging itself in ways that allow the latter to prevail more and more often. The book has been one of this fall’s biggest, and its surprising argument has led it to be reviewed and debated widely.

Judging by the FAQ posted to Pinker’s website, a common concern among people engaging with The Better Angels of Our Nature is Pinker’s definition of violence. His explanation:

I use the term in its standard sense, more or less the one you’d find in a dictionary (such as The American Heritage Dictionary Fifth Edition: “Behavior or treatment in which physical force is exerted for the purpose of causing damage or injury.”) In particular, I focus on violence against sentient beings: homicide, assault, rape, robbery, and kidnapping, whether committed by individuals, groups, or institutions. Violence by institutions naturally includes war, genocide, corporal and capital punishment, and deliberate famines.

Another refrain among readers: what about more abstract forms of violence, like economic or environmental? Pinker responds:

The fact that Bill Gates has a bigger house than I do may be deplorable, but to lump it together with rape and genocide is to confuse moralization with understanding. Ditto for underpaying workers, undermining cultural traditions, polluting the ecosystem, and other practices that moralists want to stigmatize by metaphorically extending the term violence to them. It’s not that these aren’t bad things, but you can’t write a coherent book on the topic of “bad things.”

To which we say: fair enough. And yet some of the critique of Pinker’s book has put us in mind of Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, a book we published earlier this year. Nixon’s book is driven by his conviction that we need to politically, imaginatively, and theoretically “rethink” what he calls “slow violence,” a class of violence that doesn’t align with what Pinker refers to as the “standard sense.” From Nixon’s book:

By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings—the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war’s toxic aftermaths or climate change—are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory.

Pinker’s violence is one dependent on intention to do harm, and one may argue that an absence of intention distinguishes Nixon’s slow violence from Pinker’s more traditionally understood forms. But Nixon begins his book by quoting from a confidential World Bank memo written in 1991 by Larry Summers that indicates that we’d be mistaken to assume that these slower forms of violence are free from malevolence:

I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. . . . I’ve always thought that countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles. . . . Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the Least Developed Countries?

07 July 2011

Everyone knows you have to be delicate with insects. Most of us have probably made the mistake of handling the wings of butterflies or moths, accidentally removing some of their “dust,” which is actually comprised of the scales that they need to fly. Who hasn’t, as a child, been a little too careless and mauled a ladybug? Or, among those of us who were lucky enough to grow up in regions they populate, let curiosity get the better of us when handling a lightning bug or firefly? You have to be delicate with insects.

Scientists from France and Scotland recorded the aquatic animal “singing” at up to 99.2 decibels, the equivalent of listening to a loud orchestra play while sitting in the front row.

The insect makes the sound by rubbing its penis against its abdomen in a process known as “stridulation”.

Researchers say the song is a courtship display performed to attract a mate.

On average, the songs of M. scholtzi reached 78.9 decibels, comparable to a passing freight train.

First off, let’s note that “stridulation” is not actually defined as “rubbing genitalia against belly.” Mark Denny and Alan McFadzean explain in their book Engineering Animals: How Life Works, in a chapter on animal communication:

Sound is just a vibration: to make it you have to move things. Most insects and other noisy arthropods achieve this by stridulation—rubbing one body part against another. Generally this action involves a body part that acts as a file and another that acts as a pick: ideally the pick is connected to some sort of resonant structure, such as wing panels. The file is dragged across the pick (or vice-versa) and a noise is generated.

So this bug, the Micronecta scholtzi, a freshwater insect that measures just 2mm, is stridulating its way to the rumble of a freight train. The scientists who made the discovery say that if body size is taken into account then the M. scholtzi are the loudest animals on earth. The fact that the bug makes this call underwater explains why scientists are just now noting its extraordinary volume, as 99% of the sound is lost when transferring from water to air.

In his recent book Cricket Radio: Tuning In the Night-Singing Insects, John Himmelman explains everything about the calling of crickets and katydids, the singing insects we’re likely most familiar with. Crickets and katydids stridulate with their legs, a more common variation than is practiced by the M. scholtzi. In crickets the file and pick, or scraper, are together referred to as the “stridulary organ,” but in the case of the M. scholtzi that begins to sound like a bit of a euphemism. Himmelman also explains that some grasshoppers engage in a different kind of noisemaking, known as “crepitation,” in which the rapid opening of the hind wings creates a crackling sound.

We built a web page that lets you hear the different calls of some of Himmelman’s crickets. Have a listen to them, and then go hear what the M. scholtzi sounds like, courtesy of the BBC. It’s sort of like a maraca. Not so delicate after all.

Denmark’s famed “Little Harbor Lady,” or in English, “Little Mermaid,” has had her share of antics and perils. She’s been photographed by millions in Copenhagen’s harbor, carted off and shown at the 2010 World’s Fair in Shanghai, beheaded (several times), dynamited, splashed with pink paint, and enveloped in a burqa. An environmental nerd for all occasions, I look at her longing face and wonder, How long before the rising sea swallows her up? Bolted to that rock in the sea, a shaft of concrete now inserted into her neck, what will she do? Or, for that, matter, what about the thousands of others who call coastal Copenhagen home? Is anyone thinking about this?

Many experts expect the world’s seas to rise somewhere between 1 to 1.5 meters this century, depending on location (and, of course, it could be more). Add to this a potential for stronger storms and much higher storm surges and you see why cities like Copenhagen, London, New York, and Miami are all in the crosshairs.

Danish experts have begun using computer-enhanced mapping techniques to predict what a high-tide of 2.26 meters—what they believe a "20-year event" might look like in 2110—would do to the city. The result leaves an inner city map covered in blue, including the Danish Stock Exchange, the Royal Library, and the city’s stunning Opera House. For this reason, the country is developing a proposal for a dike along Copenhagen’s North Harbor and an area called Kalveboderne to protect some of the city’s most treasured assets. For areas lying outside the protected region, which includes the Opera House, engineers are considering elevating roads and introducing architectural adjustments.

Back in New Orleans, where I live, we are also strengthening our fortress walls. At the opening of hurricane season this month, city residents took comfort (perhaps) in the strongest flood-control system ever constructed for the region. My favorite part is the Lake Borgne Barrier, a 1.8-mile-long castle-toothed wall, anchored by 66-inch-wide, 144-foot-deep concrete columns. The structure, which cost $1.1 billion and was built in just two years, is designed to block the kind of crashing hurricane surge brought by Hurricane Katrina, which in 2005 swept through the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and Industrial Canal into the heart of New Orleans.

As I continually remind my students, resistance, while expensive and complicated, is not always futile. But it must be done with full knowledge and disclosure of what residual risk remains. And it must incorporate a strategic use of natural barriers and other natural systems to amplify the protection value. That means restoring and preserving natural buffers like beaches, wetlands, and flood plains.

The importance of natural shields, what coastal engineers call “soft-armoring,” is gaining attention all over the world. Indeed, the Obama administration has proposed a draft of revised standards for flood-control and other water resources projects that would require the “wise use of floodplains” and maintain a presumption in favor of nonstructural solutions to flood management. That would be a terrific start. But other policy innovations must follow. As legal researchers at Georgetown’s Climate Center are learning, many federal permitting systems that apply to coastal structures are designed to favor “hard armoring” proposals, often fast-tracked through general permits, over less familiar “soft armoring” techniques.

And what of Copenhagen’s Little Harbor Lady? Standing next to her, assuming my straightest posture, I estimate that a high-tide of 2.26 meters would at least encircle the waist of this pensive lass, though I like to imagine those finned ankles would do her some good. Staying afloat, you know, is mostly about preparation.

16 May 2011

Saturday was International Migratory Bird Day, and shame on us for not having properly recognized it. According to the Environment for the Americas group, the day exists to educate and empower people to help combat the many threats to healthy bird populations. You all out there can of course be forgiven if the day passed without your notice. Not so for us, given that we’ve just published Engineering Animals: How Life Works, a book that explains the actual physical principles of animal structure and behavior. Animals as machines, basically.

One the book’s richest sections is on animal navigation, which really is the most fascinating aspect of bird migration. How do they know where to go? And how to do they know when they get there? As the book’s authors Mark Denny and Alan McFadzean explain, we’re just beginning to understand the complexity of these practices:

The past half century has seen a revolution in our understanding of animal navigation brought about by many, many thousands of studies: radar or global positioning system (GPS) tracking observations; experiments that altered the apparent direction of the sun, or the brightness or color of light; experiments in which migrating birds were displaced several hundred or thousand kilometers; experiments in which animals were blindfolded in one or both eyes, or had their sense of smell removed, or were placed in planetariums with altered star patterns, or had magnets attached, or were banded or radio-tagged. . . . It used to be thought that, for example, a migratory bird made use of a single skill, such as navigating via the sun, but our understanding has broadened considerably and with greater understanding comes greater respect for the capabilities of migrant animals: most birds use many different cues, which they prioritize in different ways when these cues conflict.

One of the things that these experiments have shown is that many migrating animals are born with routes hardwired into their brains. “Head southwest for 9 days, then turn due south until you reach a desert, then head east for four days and then south until you run out of gas.” That sort of thing. In one experiment that helped document this hardwiring, a group of migrating European starlings was displaced several hundred kilometers south while en route to their usual wintering groups in northern France. The older birds that had previously made the journey used cues such as the sun’s location in the sky to sense their displacement, adjusted course, and made it to their intended destination. The younger birds, on their first trip, just followed the hardwiring in their brains (“A direction for X days, then B direction for Y days, etc.”) without correcting for the displacement, and ended up in northern Spain. Denny and McFadzean: “Clearly, the novices were just reading the instructions that their genes handed out to them, whereas the more experienced birds were overriding these with learned cues, enabling a more flexible response to changed circumstances.” Most amazing part? Conditioned by this first voyage, the young starlings actually returned to northern Spain in subsequent years, not to the France that their genes intended.

28 April 2011

The Endangered Species Act was signed into law by President Nixon in 1973. Surprisingly, from the vantage point of today’s political climate, it was an act passed with a great deal of bipartisan support. Protecting animals just seemed like the right thing to do. What quickly became clear, though, was that the act was about preserving habitats, which sometimes overlapped with land held by people and developers. And so the Endangered Species Act became a controversial lightning rod in a country that’s always been deeply concerned with its property.

In the most infamous clash, the Supreme Court was compelled by the act to block construction of a massive dam on the Little Tennessee River because it would destroy the habitat of a three-inch fish called the snail darter. That innocent little swimmer with its silly little name became a much-mocked emblem for all that anyone could dislike about conservation. In response to the kerfuffle, Congress maneuvered to change the rules of the E.S.A. Al Gore sided with the dam, while Newt Gingrich voted for the fish. Conservation and constituencies make for strange politics, no? The E.S.A. was changed, the dam was built, and the snail darter went extinct on the Little Tennessee.

In Listed: Dispatches from America’s Endangered Species Act, the organismic and evolutionary biologist Joe Roman makes a new case for why the E.S.A. is so important, and why the debates still surrounding it need to be reshaped. In a recent episode of the HUP Podcast, which you can hear below, Roman succinctly explained the root of the issue:

“People can sort of rally behind the idea of protecting species… If we could just protect species in zoos, then there would probably be no conflict. You could invest a little bit of money and put all these species aside and if that was the goal then that would be fine. The issue is that of course it really is about ecosystems. You can’t protect a species without protecting its ecosystem, and you can’t protect an ecosystem without protecting its species, so it’s a combination of the two. That’s the only sustainable way of really protecting species, is by protecting their habitat. Now, that can put (protection) at conflict with private landowners, for example.”

You can use the player below to hear the podcast, or point your browser here.

The key argument of Roman’s work is that we should shift the conversation from the economic costs of protection to the economic benefits, for which he says there is overwhelming evidence. In the book he describes any number of these, from Florida communities whose entire tourist industry is built around visitors clamoring to see the endangered manatee, to coastal areas where whale watching ventures have helped to replace some of the jobs and money lost by the decline in fisheries, to the storm-protection benefits of preserving Louisiana’s wetlands.

The current issue of Harvard Magazine includes an excerpt adapted from Listed that tells another one of these stories. This one’s about, well, whale poop. And, for real, from now on when you hear “whale poop” you should think “Joe Roman,” because he’s been the leader in imagining and then documenting its benefits, both ecological and economic. It’s a great story of how a eureka moment becomes a game-changing scientific finding. As Roman put it, “One of the great joys of science has to be turning a thought that surfaced one night over a few beers into a full-blown field project.” You can read the story online here.

22 April 2011

Today, in recognition of Earth Day, let’s spend a little time with E.O. Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American biologist and author of The Ants, Sociobiology, and The Diversity of Life, among many other influential works. In 2007 Wilson was awarded one of the much-coveted TED prizes, given annually as a means to leverage the sprawling TED community’s talents and resources. In his acceptance speech, which you can watch below, Wilson discussed his own development as a scientist, from a young child to a pioneer in the study of the endlessly diverse species on Earth.

He discussed the great danger facing those species and our earth:

Each of these species, even the tiniest, are masterpieces of evolution. Each have persisted for thousands and millions of years. Each is exquisitely adapted to the environment in which it lives, interlocked with other species to form the ecosystems on which are own lives depend in ways we have not begun even to imagine. We will destroy these ecosystems and the species composing them at the peril of our own existence. And unfortunately, we are destroying them, with ingenuity and ceaseless energy.

Here’s the speech. It’s worth your time.

Along with the prize comes the invitation to make “one wish to change the world.” Wilson’s wish, as he explained in the video above, was for the creation of the “Encyclopedia of Life,” a tool to inspire the preservation of earth’s biodiversity. He got his wish:

18 March 2011

It’s the second beautiful day in a row here in Cambridge, cause for outright glee in these heavily wintered parts. Spring can’t be too far off, soon after that will be summer, and somewhere in all this weather will come those night-singing insects, the crickets and katydids. These bugs emit such beautiful calls, but we usually tune them out, mostly noticing them only as a signal of silence. It’s a strange thing, really, how the presence of these distinct calls largely illustrates for us a broader absence of noise. John Himmelman’s new book, Cricket Radio, is all about tuning back in.

Himmelman, the author and illustrator of dozens of nature books, explains the human brain’s propensity for tuning out ever-present sounds and then makes the case for how and why we should reawaken our brains to the sounds of these night-singers. As Himmelman tells it, opening our ears to insect calls can be more than just an escape from the cacophony of modern life. It can be a little bridge to the sounds of the past. He’s driven by a love for a neglected corner of our everyday lives, and is determined to share it.

And share it he does, in Cricket Radio. He takes us along with him as he hunts insects, through the silent approaches, the painstaking waits, and the frustration of a cricket bounding off before it can be properly photographed and recorded:

After every step or two, stop and listen. If the insect is still calling, chances are you haven’t been seen or heard yet. If it has stopped, don’t resume moving until it calls again. While you’re waiting for your original caller to begin singing, listen for others nearby, should you need to abandon that one. Giving up on a particular individual you may have been stalking for fifteen minutes is a tough call to make. You’ve already invested the time in this one. However, there’s a chance that if it remains silent for too long, it could be because you are right on top of it. If this is the case, it will stay hidden until you move on. Of course, as soon as you give up and move toward the next one, it will start calling again. I am not above swearing at a bug.

If you’ve never given it a second thought, crickets are just crickets. But cricketing is a lot like birding, in that there are vast numbers of these bugs, each with their own look and call. Cricket Radio explains the endless variety, and Himmelman’s ability to tell them all apart by sight and by sound is fascinating. Each is distinct, and when Himmelman brings them home to observe more closely he has to build different types of environments for each. In the book’s last chapter, he explains how to build your own cricket radio at home, the perfect summer project for nature lovers. And don’t think you need pristine fields in which to hunt—one of the book’s best tales is of a chase that begins in a motel parking lot. As the Wall Street Journal notes, Himmelman’s “enchantment with the entomological soundscape is so complete that he can turn the most unpromising site—his Connecticut backyard, for example—into an insect lover's terra incognita, shimmering with possibility.”

To give you a sense of the variety of night-singing insects and the challenge of telling them all apart, we’ve put together a little web page where you can see and hear six different insects. Internet streaming cricket radio, if you will. Bookmark the page and listen for awhile whenever you want some moments of calm or a shot of summer. But also to get yourself primed for appreciating the real bugs outside. Then find a copy of Cricket Radio when you’re ready for your next lesson in tuning in.

25 February 2011

Robert Verchick, author of Facing Catastophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World, recently completed a twelve month stint as the deputy associate administrator of the Office of Policy with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Last week he was at the White House to celebrate the announcement of President Obama’s conservation initiative, America’s Great Outdoors. Below, he highlights some of the initiative’s most promising recommendations.

-----

If you’ve ever visited the Great Smoky Mountains National Park—one of the most visited national parks in the United States—you have Horace Kephart and George Masa to thank. These two men, the first a travel writer, the second a landscape photographer from Osaka, Japan, each settled among those six-thousand foot peaks with intentions of starting a new life in the American wild. Unfortunately, the timber industry had gotten there first and was soon mowing down forests at the rate of 60 acres per day. Distressed by such calamity, Kephart and Masa organized a diverse grassroots campaign to raise millions of dollars to save the area. Fueled by church donations, high school fundraisers, and other activities, the campaign eventually enabled the federal government, through a public-private partnership, to set aside land for what would finally become by 1940 a protected, 814-square-mile expanse of America’s Great Outdoors.

On February 16, 2011, President Barack Obama invoked the memory of Kephart and Masa before a cheerful audience in the East Room of the White House, as he reported on his administration’s centerpiece conservation strategy known as the America’s Great Outdoors Initiative. I was there, squeezed between two-big shouldered men and surrounded by dozens of outdoor enthusiasts: ranchers, farmers, hunters, anglers, corporate executives, tribal representatives, backpackers, environmental activists, and two adorable grade school girls from the Washington area, wearing “Buddy Bison” T-shirts. I was not the only one to note the irony of celebrating the outdoors in an indoor venue (what, then, do you do with your cowboy hat?), but that point soon gave way to the just-released AGO Report which articulated for the first time the President’s strategy for a 21st century conservation and recreation agenda. (Disclosure: I recently served in the Obama Administration and contributed to the report.)

Open the executive summary to Chapter 1 and you learn that the most pressing challenge in the nation’s great outdoors is . . . Jobs! We need them! And fast! So the first recommendations center on streamlining federal career opportunities in nature conservancy and developing a Conservation Service Corps for young people interested in public lands and water restoration. Both fine ideas, particularly the second, which the President said would “encourage young people to put down the remote or the video games and get outside.” But the real meat comes in a later chapter on conservation and restoration.

08 June 2009

We are pleased to note that our friend Kate Jackson, who detailed her fieldwork adventures in Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science, and Survival in the Congo, which has been called "an inspiration to future field biologists" (Choice) and which contains some of the most explicit descriptions of maggots burrowing into a researcher's skin that you'll find in any Harvard Press book, has taken a somewhat different tack with her next project. Katie of the Sonoran Desert: Based on a True Story is a bilingual children's book from the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum Press that gives us "the true story of Katie, a meter-long western diamondback rattlesnake,
and her adventures as she struggles to make a life for herself in the
harsh Sonoran Desert." Nothing better for the burgeoning bilingual herpetologist in your family.

Kate is pictured at right, in a photo from Mean and Lowly, wrangling Grayia ornata, which goes by many names, including the Ornate African Water Snake.

About

The Harvard University Press Blog brings you books, ideas, and news from Harvard University Press. Founded in 1913, Harvard University Press has published such iconic works as Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s The Woman That Never Evolved.